"New York Times v. Sullivan: A Retrospective After 40 Years"

The New York Times v. Sullivan decision by the Supreme Court still sets the precedent in libel law regarding public officials, and thus has a direct bearing on freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the United States. Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times reporter who covered this historic case, will speak about the momentous legal issues that were at stake then. He will be joined via miked telephone by Roland Nachman, the attorney who represented Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan of the Montgomery, Alabama, police department.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1948, Mr. Lewis began his long career at The New York Times. In 1955, he joined the newspaper’s Washington Bureau. After a Nieman fellowship at the Harvard Law School in 1956-1957, he covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the Government's handling of the civil rights movement. For his coverage of the Supreme Court in 1963, he won the Pulitzer Prize. The next year he became chief of the Times London Bureau. Mr. Lewis began writing his column from London in 1969. Since 1973 he has been living in Boston. A Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School for 15 years, he taught a course on the Constitution and the Press. Since 1983, he has held the James Madison Visiting Professorship at Columbia University. His three books are Gideon's Trumpet, Portrait of a Decade, and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.